SOUL OF CASH.

It doesn't matter how many country bros dip into the hip-hop well and rap about dirtroad memories or honky-tonk badonkadonks: In the popular imagination, country music scans as white music. So if I tell you a soul singer has just put out a collection of Johnny Cash songs, a lot of you will imagine a novelty record--something along the lines of a polka-disco album or a Cajun rap.

Resist the thought. Even in the age of Jim Crow, America's ears found ways to evade segregation: Behind those allegedly rigid color lines, generations of black and white musicians have been listening to each other and absorbing the sounds they hear. Brian Owens' fine new album Soul of Cash belongs to a long tradition of country-soul crossovers--a tradition so long, in fact, that more than one of these...